


A happy lip—breaks sudden

by middlemarch



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: American Civil War, F/M, Friendship, Gen, Kisses, Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-13
Updated: 2016-10-21
Packaged: 2018-08-22 05:43:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8274880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: What she wants.





	1. Emma

Emma wanted to be kissed. She wanted to fall asleep in a hard-backed chair or the bench in the front hall of Mansion House and wake to a soft, warm, sure touch upon her mouth, a greeting not a demand, a hand at her cheek tracing her skin. She would keep her eyes closed and enjoy the certainty that when she opened them, the man before her would be the right one, like the prince awakening the princess in one of the brightly colored books of fairy tales she had so loved as a child. Her governess had never liked reading them, Emma had found she understood that from the young woman’s tone of voice, and they bored Mamma as well but there was something perfect and consoling about the stories to Emma, the early grounding details about lentils or a slipper’s laces or the interlocking golden barbs on a feather and then the remove at the end, the lovely vagueness of the prince and absence of any emotion in the princess other than an abstract satisfaction at the complete correctness of a conclusion. Emma had been uncertain of Frank before the War but she had assumed it was only because they were so young and life so long and possibly dull, nothing that seemed to belong to such a bright, bold fellow; she’d thought that the uncertainty was part of a proper romance, like Frank’s ardent, misspelled letters and the way he looked at her across a room and made her blush without saying a word. Now, though, she was uncertain of him and not them, who he truly was, a patriot or a traitor, a friend or an executioner, and all the while there was Henry Hopkins, so tall and straight and earnest, gentle where other men, where Frank, was rough, strong where she knew so many men to be weak, unsmiling when it was a time for honesty. It seemed like she would never decide which one was the companion of her soul, as Nurse Mary had put it when she spoke of her dead husband. So Emma longed to be kissed and for the moment to define her, to hear her name on his lips and know this was her beloved, come what may, someone who could wake her and wait for her to recognize his face, who would smile when she opened her eyes and began to kiss him back.


	2. Anne

Anne wanted to be kissed. By Byron Frederick Boethius Hale, his gingery whiskers rough against her chapped cheeks, the more delicate skin of her décolletage that was hidden by bodice and pinafore, tickling her ankles till she thrust a foot beside his jaw, the entrée he had hoped for. Anne longed to be free of her buckram stays, the coarse calico of her dress, and to lie in his bed entirely bare with the sweet Virginia breeze from the garden in place of a sheet; she’d found Byron as quick to pounce on her as he was to amputate a boy’s leg that had just begun to stink of gangrene. He was not the most generous lover and his attempts at poetry were dismal, even after she’d suggested he memorize something if he were so determined to declaim as he pulled down his braces and untucked his long linen shirt, but he was eager for her and eager to be satisfied, even if she was no longer in her first bloom of youth. She wouldn’t have spared him a second glance then, so sure life held such riches for her, every dream she’d ever had and some she hadn’t, all ready to fall in her lap like the petals plucked from a daisy. She’d learned her lesson and it seemed some days like she’d learned everyone else’s lessons, from her miserly uncle in London, her sour-faced older sister jealous of the husband she’d somehow managed to secure, from the grey-eyed captain in Scutari who’d been mute when he died in her arms and dear Miss Nightingale’s hand as she held the lamp, and lately she’d been the understudy to a most peculiar Baroness. Anne hadn’t abandoned ambition but she let it fall to the ground with her petticoats when the nights were starless, when boys who’d lied to join the army lay panting the floor below her for their mothers, much as the women themselves must have labored to bear them. She pulled Byron closer then, because she could, and stopped her mouth with his. His lips were soft and she liked to hear the hum he made as she stroked his head. He’d finally understood all he should say then was her name, not _darling_ or _sweetheart_ , that he might kiss her wherever he wanted but never make a promise until they lay sated, he muzzy-headed and she with the clarity of a sage, impervious to any ignominy or indignity. She’d allowed herself to admit she wanted him, as lacking as she found him, still he should belong to her; she would sit behind him when he made to get up, pressing her bare breasts against his back, pressing kisses to his freckled shoulders as she wound her arms around him and clasped her hands in front of his heart, as if she would never let him go. He liked that idea so she didn’t argue, just craned her neck so he could twist and give her one last kiss, unstudied, careless, a lover’s kiss for a woman he didn’t imagine his wife even if she did. She managed him in every other way so she allowed it, let him gorge himself with her. She knew it wouldn’t always be like this, that as Mrs. Hale there’d be none of this, but it was right for the moment when they were trapped by Phinney and Foster and McBurney far quicker than Summers to espy any transgression. There’d been far less liquor in the medicine cabinet and somehow never any when she wanted it, so she got herself drunk on Byron’s mouth, let him make her dizzy by taking the breath from her lungs till he gasped with it. Oh, she wanted to be kissed, to forget and be made to remember!


	3. Aurelia

Aurelia wanted to be kissed. She wanted Gabriel to sneak onto her pallet beside her and butt his round head at her until she shifted and rearranged her body to hold him again, his spine against her belly, the knobs of bone cushioned by her flesh. When she dreamily thought he was finally settled next to her, he would move, curl around in a way she remembered from carrying him, where there had been no words for the movements. It hadn’t mattered since her pace had rocked him back to sleep then, so he was heavy but easy under her heart, crowding her lungs. She wanted him to pull her forearm next to his face and to feel his mouth on her skin, quickly making a design, like the fallen petals did from a rose, his whispered _Momma, Momma_ pulling an answering hum from her throat. If she drew him closer, he would put his cold feet against her calves but she wouldn’t startle from it; she was used to giving him whatever he wanted, if she could, and the warmth she’d accrued from the night’s sleep was little enough. 

Samuel wanted to kiss her but she didn’t want a man’s mouth on hers. He was a gentle man, careful and cautious, he knew to move slowly around her and to let her take what she wanted from him. But his friendship was all she felt an urge for, although just to stand next to him did not make her feel dread collect at the base of her skull, thump at her heels where they struck the floor. Perhaps, some time in the future, when she had her boy again beside her and enough food for them both, maybe in Boston where Nurse Mary meant to send her, she could consider Samuel’s hankering for her. He’d given her a bird in flight; he wouldn’t want to keep her in a cage but she needed longer to be alone in her own body, needed to heal for more days, maybe as many as the raindrops in a storm, and forget the suffering, the relief of the wound. She needed to pray over the look in Bullen’s eyes when he understood how she would leave him to die in a pool of his own blood and urine, the light growing greyer and greyer till it was red with Hellfire.

Aurelia wanted to be kissed by her son and to kiss his cheek and watch him rub at the spot, to keep it or make it go away. It wouldn’t matter what he chose if she could kiss him again.


	4. Bridget

Bridget wanted to be kissed, but it seemed clear there were none left living who’d wish to oblige her. She’d left behind her mother and sisters in Ireland these many years, their eyes all the vivid green of home in her memory, and her man had died in the cholera, her boys too. No one remained who had known her to be young and beautiful with it, her hair shining under her cap, her cheeks ruddy with October’s chill. People touched her—sick boys clung to her hand if she let them and many a young mother had wept on Mam Brannan’s shoulder when there was no milk for the new babe and no way to make it come. She was jostled in the street when she went out, even if she brought an orderly with her, and the drunks in the alleys didn’t hesitate to reach out to pull at her skirt; she kicked them aside, no patience for wastrels without their wits now or ever. She could hardly recall how it felt, the sloppy smacks her boys had given her, her mother’s lips light on her forehead, where the third eye would be, the one for the Sight. Her husband’s kiss, quick and distracted when the men called for him as they tramped into work, soft on her wrist when she ladled the stew in his bowl and reminded him to say Grace first before he fell ravenous on the meat, his lips warm at her throat, on her mouth when they were both, rarely, not exhausted but the boys were, the silence of the house around them the greatest incentive, his hands fumbling at her garters even after years of marriage. 

She’d resigned herself, a woman without a family, to the impersonal caress of shoulders, the faint heat as one body passed another or waited beside it, but she was surprised, pleasantly so, by the Yankee Baroness who’d clapped her hands and pressed a kiss, sweet and glancing but real, the ripe, fresh curve of a cheek against her own drawn visage, when Bridget told her the quinine was in and that she’d haggled well enough to secure enough coffee and sugar, proper sugar and not sorghum, mind, for the month. She shouldn’t have been shocked—the young woman had been hurling herself amid and onto the denizens of Mansion House since her arrival, some peculiarity of her own person, as Bridget had never known another Yankee woman to behave so simultaneously brazenly and demure, her gestures an overflowing of her ardent spirit that life had still, somehow, not taught her to contain better. Mary Phinney von Olnhausen’s dark eyes showed clear enough what she meant, if you took the trouble to look; Bridget found it was only herself and the canny freeman, Samuel Diggs, who bothered to look carefully. Perhaps it suited the hospital, for would the roof come down in a great conflagration if Nan Hastings understood the Head Nurse, yea the bricks themselves would shudder amid their mortar, the foundation collapse if Jedediah Foster turned his attention to the Baroness’s gaze and saw the truth, sharp like the stars on a chill midnight, undeniable light.

Bridget thought them all fools, a few lesser and more admirable, and numbered herself among the party. She wasn’t foolish enough to rue the kiss Mary’d given her, nor to show her fondness openly. She still trounced the Head Nurse in their chess matches and she hid her smile, sucking her teeth, at some pretty solution Mary devised, on the board, in the wards, the kitchen, what Bridget could hear of the moonlit veranda from the hall she lingered in. If she shooed Nan away a bit more or sent Foster running to where he’d find his heart’s desire, well, that was her own business, just as the kiss had been, and she kept her account books unblotted.


	5. Mary

Mary wanted to be kissed. She felt she could hardly bear to see Jedediah standing again at the threshold of the room, the ward, Mansion House, giving her another searching, warm, beseeching look, lifting his hand in an arrested gesture, parting his lips to speak and then, that voluble, articulate, impetuous, _exasperating_ man staying silent, immobile if not impassive. She wanted the equation to conclude, perfectly or not, she wanted him to take her in his arms, to kiss her mouth softly for only a moment and then to be ardent, hungry, impatient as she was, parting his lips against hers, tasting her, unafraid of rejection, driven and as openly desirous as he had been hesitantly affectionate, so carefully tender. She wanted his hands on her face, holding her to him not because he thought she might flee or needed coaxing, but because he was greedy for her, the feeling of her skin against his palms, his fingers stroking the pulse in her throat. He must take all the pins from her hair, drag the netting from her braids and let the weight of her curls become a dark cloud, an unraveled skein to tangle himself in. To hear the pins as they hit the floor, his panting breath loud in her ear, the name he preferred to call her _Molly!_ clear, not a whisper, the way he would demand a scalpel, sure it would be given to him, entirely entitled to it... Nothing delicate—his hands at her breasts, her ribs, finding her hips and bottom through the heavy layers of her dress, the heat of his bare skin incontrovertible against her stays as he unbuttoned her bodice, through the fine, limp muslin of her chemise, the scent of her flesh making him pull her closer, the sweat between her breasts an enticement even as it slowed his fingers tracing her there, the curve that concealed her heartbeat, the nipple he grazed once, then again with a wicked smile against her mouth when she gasped, again, as she arched against him, into him. 

After Gustav died, she thought all this had died with him. Though, she admitted to herself for there was no one else she would, she could tell, _this_ with Jedediah was its own animal and that was the only word for it. She might return some time to a gentlewoman’s yearning, to misty, autumnal daydreams and bits of lyric poetry that spoke to her of him “Withhold no atom’s atom or I die,” but she was a creature now, her own and not his possession, but she was urged by her heart, the blood in her veins, the busy marrow that throbbed within her bones and the breath her lungs’ one currency, urged to him, to him and how he matched her, his companion self, the power of his soul animating the body, sinew and nerve that was him. She wanted to turn to him and know without thought that he would turn back to her, an embrace always the first overture, when all they had had was wit and worry, rare merriment and common argument over how suffering could be dealt with, but never their own. Gustav had been such consolation, he acknowledged her in a world that generally chose not to, but Jedediah was a challenge and always happier when she retorted and didn’t demur, liked it best when she was besting him; nothing stoked his interest as much as when she let herself be revealed to him, but she was exhausted, sick with only being allowed to be one soul, one mind, in communion with his, to love without lust was a waste and she felt she was wasting away with it. She wanted nearness to lose its meaning, to laugh and hear him laugh in response when she wriggled to make by become beneath, under, upon become within until he could not laugh, words choked in his throat as she hummed and chose not to say his name, but to lick his neck, the skin and where his beard grew both lush on her tongue, her arms holding him to her and no gazing, no dark eyes questioning, rejoicing-- both of them willingly, eagerly blind, vision replaced by touch, the dizzying scent of her skin rubbing his, heartbeats and moans, nothing like her widow’s grief, his fearful cry for the needle, the passion of satisfaction beckoning, the confidence of consummation, that they would lie together, fallen apart and still be bound, without needing to look for confirmation. Whatever words they might say would be echoes of their bodies' directness, boldness irrelevant as they spoke calmly, curious but unafraid, with so much unconcealed.

Mary wanted to be kissed. And kissed. She did not wish, she _wanted_ and she wanted the declaration of his mouth so she could swallow it, she wanted to startle him and make him draw back, just a little, so she could step forward and put one hand against his bearded cheek, so she could kiss him. And kiss and kiss. Without doubt, without qualification, without the interruption of law or vow, fear or shame, whole, compleat, like the marriage she’d known and wanted again, reinvented with him, that Jedediah had never known but had discovered was everything.

**Author's Note:**

> This is a little chaptered series of drabbles looking at the relationships on Mercy Street, yet again. Quite possibly entirely self-indulgent and thus, fan fiction at its best. The title is from Emily Dickinson.


End file.
